To prepare for the role of Travis Bickle in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver, Robert DeNiro famously drove a cab for a few weeks. It's not a bad idea for IT staff to similarly live the life of a remote worker for a while to see how technology behaves outside the corporate campus. Setting up a telecommuting lab is one way to do that, suggests analyst firm Forrester Research.

Creating a virtual or on-premise telecommuting lab can help IT better understand the daily experience and challenges of remote workers, according to Brownlee Thomas, a principal analyst at Forrester. "It will provide direct input for IT architects about the likely impact of new application deployments in a remote office environment, and it could help IT decide what applications might be put on servers that are outside the firewall without compromising security," Thomas wrote in a research report published late last year.

Thomas suggests different lab scenarios for companies, depending on how many teleworkers and remote workers are involved. She recommends companies with more than 500 home-based remote workers and contractors create a permanent telecommuting lab that provides a place for training teleworkers and replicating remote access products and services. An ad-hoc IT lab is probably sufficient for enterprises that don’t plan to hire home-based remote workers in the near future but may want to train employees for regular part-time telecommuting.
 
If a company is just getting started with telecommuting, a virtual lab is an easy option to consider, according to Thomas. One way to set up a virtual telecommuting lab is to have IT staff outfit their own homes with the requisite technologies and provide IT support remotely, either on a full- or part-time basis. For example, an IT staffer could equip a home office with different types of Internet access - such as dial-up, cable, DSL, satellite and wireless access - to see how applications perform under different conditions.

It sounds like a good idea to me. But I wonder how many companies have formalized their telework plans enough to consider creating such a lab, whether physical or virtual? If your company uses a telecommuting lab to train employees or try out telework technologies, please let me know. I'd like to hear what it took to get the lab operational and how it's working out. If any company is willing to share their experience with me, I'll write it up in a future newsletter.